User:Lensovet

General
Hello,

My name is Paul, I work on a number of open-source projects. I specialize in web design and localization.

My goals for Wikipedia are to correct errors or unclear phrasing, and to make more articles available/bring existing articles up-to-date into Russian. The Russian-related goals have taken a total back seat at this point, so I'm mostly rewording passages. Every so often I actually write my own material from scratch.

User History
Many years ago, at some point in the late 1990s, I had come across the Wikipedia website and stumbled upon a sort of "spirit of Wikipedia" webpage, which discussed the whole concept of what is an encyclopedia that everyone can edit and the problems/benefits arising out of the concept. At the time, I found the concept great in theory, and even looked at a few articles on things that I knew at the time. After the incident, Wikipedia retreated into the faraway regions of my memory

A couple of years after this initial interaction, I came across the site again, recalling the concepts that I had read about a couple of years earlier. At this point, however, I had a sudden urge to join in the fun. I started making some minor edits, mostly on grammar. Then, while doing various research projects during my senior year of high school, I decided that I wanted to get all the credit that I can get for my work, and signed up for an account. I have been making edits ever since.

The peak of my contributions happened in 2006, both on Wikipedia and the Commons (in uploading images for the latter). All of the work that I upload there is licensed under a custom license of mine,. After a couple of edit wars, and increasing demands from college classwork, my contributions have dropped off significantly, such that over the past two years, I have probably made less than 100 edits total. We'll see what the future holds, though.

Meaning of username
The name is a actually a word in Russian – Ленсовет. The Russian word is a portmanteau of two words, Leningrad and Sovet. The first, obviously, is the name of the city of Leningrad, while the second is a regular Russian word meaning council. The Lensovet was the city council of Leningrad during the Soviet era. Its modern-day successor is the Saint Petersburg Legislative Assembly, Законодательное собрание Санкт-Петербурга.

My dad had originally chosen the name back in 1998 when he signed me up for my original America Online screenname. While at first I wasn't crazy about the name, it eventually grew on me and is now my first choice of username whenever I sign up on websites, because it's rarely taken.

Some milestones
Soxred's Edit Counter

Personal biography
I was born in Leningrad, RSFSR, USSR (present-day St. Petersburg, Russia), where I lived until 1996. At the end of that year, I moved to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York, where I spent roughly a year and a half before moving to Chatham Township, New Jersey. I graduated from CHS in 2005, and embarked on a cross-country road trip with my dad in the summer of that year. Currently, I live in Granada Hills, California when I'm not in college, and I attend the University of California, Berkeley during the academic year.